CHAPTER III

BENNINGTON HUNTS FOR GOLD AND FINDS A KISS

One day Old Mizzou brought him a blue-print map.

“This y’ar map,” said he, spreading it out under his stubby fingers, “shows the deestrict.  I gets it of Fay, so you gains an idee of th’ lay of the land a whole lot.  Them claims marked with a crost belongs to th’ Company.  You kin take her and explore.”

This struck Bennington as an excellent idea.  He sat down at the table and counted the crosses.  There were fourteen of them.  The different lodes were laid off in mathematically exact rectangles, running in many directions.  A few joined one another, but most lay isolated.  Their relative positions were a trifle confusing at first, but, after a little earnest study, Bennington thought he understood them.  He could start with the Holy Smoke, just outside the door.  The John Logan lay beyond, at an obtuse angle.  Then a jump of a hundred yards or so to the southwest would bring him to the Crazy Horse.  This he resolved to locate, for it was said to be on the same “lode” as a big strike some one had recently made.  He picked up his rifle and set out.

Now, a blue-print map maker has undoubtedly accurate ideas as to points of the compass, and faultless proficiency in depicting bird’s-eye views, but he neglects entirely the putting in of various ups and down, slants and windings of the country, which apparently twist the north pole around to the east-south-east.  You start due west on a bee line, according to directions; after about ten feet you scramble over a fallen tree, skirt a boulder, dip into a ravine, and climb a ledge.  Your starting point is out of sight behind you; your destination is, Heaven knows where, in front.  By the time you have walked six thousand actual feet, which is as near as you can guess to fifteen hundred theoretical level ones, your little blazed stake in a pile of stones is likely to be almost anywhere within a liberal quarter of a mile.  Then it is guess-work.  If the hill is pretty thickly staked out, the chase becomes exciting.  In the middle distance you see a post.  You clamber eagerly to it, only to find that it marks your neighbour’s claim.  You have lost your standpoint of a moment ago, and must start afresh.  In an hour’s time you have discovered every stake on the hill but the one you want.  In two hours’ time you are staggering homeward a gibbering idiot.  Then you are brought back to profane sanity by falling at full length over the very object of your search.

Bennington was treated to full measure of this experience.  He found the John Logan lode without much difficulty, and followed its length with less, for the simple reason that its course lay over the round brow of a hill bare of trees.  He also discovered the “Northeast Corner of the Crazy Horse Lode” plainly marked on the white surface of a pine stake braced upright in a pile of rocks.  Thence he confidently paced south, and found nothing.  Next trip he came across pencilled directions concerning the “Miner’s Dream Lode.”  The time after he ran against the “Golden Ball” and the “Golden Chain Lodes.”  Bennington reflected; his mind was becoming a little heated.